Believe in the power of the factor
Is the founder and president of Princes Park Touch and the leader of the LocalHero project!
In any society there has always been behaviour that is legal but undesirable. In the past this was discouraged by the close community bonds that existed that most valued and were fearful to jeopardise.
Unfortunately those bonds are breaking down. My startup is working to remedy that by introducing functionality to “name and shame” individuals who act poorly. Here it is in action:
Bookmarked: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/micropub/
Bookmarked https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/micropub/.
Crunching the figures and applying logic to determine the actual “benefit” of lockdown
The Victorian covid slogan is
Staying apart keeps us together
lying government propaganda
Lets do the maths and see if this is correct. Here is a simple calculation based on figures that are widely available and making assumptions that allow for the worst case possible.
Here are the facts, I´ll base my calculation on, they are all based on the worst possible outcomes anywhere in the world:
Lets crunch the numbers
365 days in the year * 10 years / 600 people = 6 days per person
So the maximum possible benefit per head for lockdown is an extra 6 days of life per person. I need to reiterate here this is the extreme upper bound of the benefit. If I rejigged these figures to account for the fact that the average covid death is an 82 year who is LESS healthy than average and that the worst country has a death rate better than 1 in 1000, then this figure is less than 1 day. If I rejigged it to allow for an average outcome worldwide the figure would less than 6 hours per person
So we have decimated the world economy and compromised personal liberty everywhere in the world for this. Obviously not everything in life is about crunching numbers but I don´t know about you but quality of life is a thing and I’d happily sacrifice 6 days of my life to live the last 6 months in a normal way.
We can all come to different conclusions on these decisions but these sort of figures reresent the real collective risk that covid poses to our society and to me it is sad that no one is talking about them.
Ben can I please have some free art?
I think the area where Worpress has dropped the ball is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled, instead deveopment seems to be based on UI improvements and quick wins.
There has been a lot of discussion that WordPress is becoming less user friendly and indeed it has got some traction as the recent WordPress 3.8 is certainly aimed (amongst other things) around making the dashboard more user friendly. Given this I don’t think wordpress is becoming less user friendly, however it’s never been friendly to newbies.
Instead I think the area where Worpress has dropped the ball is that sensible projects that could make its so much better are not being tackled, instead development seems to be based on UI improvements and quick wins. These are great but a better WordPress platform would make these sort of improvements easier. Indeed a better platform would enable people to build their own UI. Thus rendering the rolling MP6 (and similar initiatives) into the core moot (because developers would be rolling their own version of the dashboard through plugins).
Continue reading “WordPress development is apathetic”In reply to this analysis by Barnaby Walters of my original article.
Barnaby you wrote:
The evidence is against you here, as almost all known usage of webmention has been for short replies which don’t make sense without context.
Actually we aren’t disagreeing, maybe I didn’t express myself well when I wrote “At the moment of the method is built around a POSSE architecture. This works well for long form articles which can stand alone but address issues or ideas that are posted on an external website”.
Continue reading “Some clarification to the webmentions discussion”My thoughts on extending the webmentions functionality
I recently installed Matthias Pfefferle’s web mention plugin. It is a great plugin and hopefully when he has polished it up further he will push it out to the wordpress.org plugin repository so it can enjoy a wider audience. I actually think the Jetpack team should look at including an extended set of this functionality in its plugins as the potential for distributed sharing that the indieweb provides could be a major distinguishing feature for WordPress, and certainly a better bet than trying to roll their own social networking ecosystem.
Continue reading “Thoughts on extending webmentions”LH Rdf is back!!
Yes development has started again and the first stop is to add additional formats to the output. Previously Lh Rdf only supported RDF-xml and has been designed almost exclusively around that. Therefore to add other formats I have bundled the Easyrdf library into the plugin. When the query string lhrdf is added to the feed URL the Easyrdf parser is invoked to parse the rdf xml output string and the output is then available in various triple formats.
See code extract:
$graph = new EasyRdf_Graph();
$graph->parse($out,”rdfxml”);
$data = $graph->serialise($_GET[‘lhrdf’]);
The format chosen by value of the lhrdf variable E.G. http://localhero.biz/?feed=lhrdf&lhrdf=json
As well as simply being cool, having an option to output JSON is the main benefit as the triples are now no longer imprisoned by the same domain policy.
Surfing around the internet I recently discovered SURF‘s InContext Visualiser, which I think is a neat way to visualise of RDF relationships, especially OAI-ORE aggregated publications
I also discovered that people have already created a set of WordPress plugins (see: http://ep-books.ehumanities.nl/ ) to visualise books and other similar publications. However blogs do not fit into a book/chapter model.
However given there is already a schema for publishing blog data and my lh-rdf plugin already exposes most publicly available WordPress blog data as RDF using that format. It was an obvious next step to get the visualiser working with the LH RDF output. I have done so and hopefully you think the output is cool.
A RDF Store and SPARQL Endpoint for WP.
Intoducing LH Tools.
LH Tools is a WordPress extension that adds an (ARC-based) RDF Store and SPARQL Endpoint to the WordPress blogging system. The store is kept separate from the WP tables (i.e. it’s not a wrapper), but you can use WP’s nice admin screens to configure it, it and embed it using the large number of developer-friendly hooks that WP offers. It is based on the original work by Ben Nowack.
